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Thursday, December 13, 2012

Argonne After Dark

Long nights in lab seem like the perfect time to write blog posts, don't you think? Well, this time it's not really my lab exactly. I'm out at Argonne National Laboratory with a few of my collegues at the Advanced Photon Source. The thing about the APS is that when your beamtime is scheduled from 8 am on Wednesday to 8 am on Sunday, this means that you start at 8 am on Wednesday and run 24/7 until 8 am on Sunday, not only-day-time-hours-between-8am-Wednesday-and-8am-Sunday. Thus, I am writing this post in the wee hours of the morning during an overnight shift monitoring our data collection. In the words of Lionel Richie, I am chillin' out at Argonne allll niiiight loooong.

Even though I'm being facetious about this whole thing (probably due to lack of sleep and overabundance of cookies), the opportunity to be out at the APS is kind of awesome. I thought that I wouldn't really have need to come out here given the nature of my research, but I'm really glad that the cookie crumbled such that it was possible. You can get data here that you really can't get anywhere else. People come from all over the world to work here, and it's right in our backyard!

In between frantic periods of sample changing and gas line fiddling, there's a whole lot of waiting, as you can tell by the fact that I'm writing this post now instead of hovering over an instrument somewhere. Luckily, the folks at the APS thought of this and gave us office space full of spinning, rolling office chairs. Hours of entertainment. Also, to get around the APS, there are, I kid you not, adult-size tricycles. I think you need special training to ride them, but oh man. Oh man.

More on Argonne adventures later...now it's time for some frantic gas line fiddling!